Planetary Imaging Jupiter Stack and Sharpen

[Music] now of all the objects we can see in the night sky i love observing the planet jupiter it rotates so fast it looks different hour after hour as new storm clouds rotate into view and these features are also evolving over time and i find it's amazing that we can capture these features on a distant planet with an amateur telescope now my earlier videos we observe jupiter from the garden in the morning sky and in this video we will go through the workflow so we're going to use a high speed camera to capture a two minute video files of jupiter each containing thousands of frames and we know that a few percent of these frames will be sharp we'll use free software to reject the blurry frames we'll stack the sharp ones one on top of the other that averages out the noise but enhances the signal and will then sharpen that resulting image to reveal all the fine details on the jovian surface so let's get started the first thing we need to do is download some free software we need fire capture to capture the videos we're going to use auto stackers to sort out each video and stack the sharp frames together and then we're going to use registax to sharpen the resulting image they're all free so let's set up fire capture two things we need to do first one is set the capture time to universal time that means no matter where you are in the world or of daylight saving time the video capture is in the standard universal time and we're also going to set the format to windjupus and we'll come on to that why that's important later on so i find these settings work well but they these are based on my telescope under my observing conditions so use these as a starter for 10 and then adapt them to your own setup and your own approach so only for guidance so here is fire capture the objective here is to capture thousands of frames of which some we hope are sharp in two minutes any more than two minutes and jupiter's own rotation will blur the image we've got the gains set for 400 just a reminder these aren't hard and fast rules the gain is set for 400 i might go to 450 for faint saturn i might be at 300 if i'm licking a bright crater on the moon but 400 seems to work all right for jupiter leave the gamma at 50 that really should be unchecked and i'll do that next time i'm observing and i balance the exposure about three quarters seems to work really well set the region of interest to capture jupiter i don't want to record all this empty black space not only does that increase the file size it also slows the data rate down the usb cable into the laptop i'm normally quite well polarized so i have no need for auto guiding but some people may find that useful and i shoot in deep air mode the color detail is still there but it eases the burden on the software as it records and then processes those video files i do use the auto run feature to capture two minutes of jupiter and i put a 30 second pause in so i can check the focus every now and again so the business end then i've got a times two barley i've got my atmospheric dispersion corrector i've got the flip mirror which i used to locate the gas charts and get them onto the camera chip and because the split mirror adds so much distance and therefore pushes up the magnification i only use it to find the plants i'll take it out and then just shoot straight through to the camera without that bit in there's the motorized focuser so i think we're good to go so there is a lot of debate on the forums about the benefits of having a one-shot color camera which is nice and simple to use or a mono black and white camera with higher resolution but the downside of that is you've got to have different color filters which you then shoot different videos and then can recombine them all back together in photoshop to build your color image and in my experience i find the benefit of a one-shot color camera or the simplicity that that offers is is worth its weight in gold i don't have to deal with filters i don't have a filter wheel i don't have to shoot different videos and then process them again so in the mirror out of the way i can just see the outer focus jupiter on the screen so if i take this out calm there we have the jupiter on the screen there so with jupiter in the eyepiece in the camera we're now tracking but this big bank of clouds come in so all thin cirrus the stars are still visible but jupiter's sort of hidden behind a thin batch of that so it's going to make a cup of tea and i'll see you back here in just a second so the other thing to do is just check your fine focus and luckily i can use my motorized focuser so if you look at the screen what i'm looking at is trying to find the master i'm looking there we go some details coming through too far i'm just going back and forth i think somewhere in there is fine focus a little bit further back i'm just looking at where i can see that little moon i think that's going to be about it so this thing is not the best today it's not too bad i think i'm going to leave it there re-center jupiter look back into the tripod so the next thing to do is to get the atmospheric dispersion corrector set up correctly and what this does is earth's atmosphere introduces color fringing to the planets we get this red and the blue limb that you can see on the screen and this has two little prisms inside that controlled by these levers and if we adjust the prisms the prisms rotate and counteract that chromatic dispersion from the atmosphere so the first thing to do is just get it set level so i slide the levers like that and i now need to put that white lever which marks the center i get that so by looking along the side this plane here is horizontal so my levers and that's my knob that's now horizontal and i can do that either by adjusting that or my focus so i can i can adjust this knob and adjust the whole thing so that looks horizontal to me i'll then center this and that's then zero dispersion so i'm looking straight through the prisms so the next thing to do is to get the atmospheric dispersion corrector set so we've got the correct color fringing just check let's adjust the levers here so here are the levers and what i'm going to do is adjust them and you can see firstly that moves the disc around on the screen which is a bit of a faff but it doesn't line the circles up and we still got that red blue fringing so i'm going to put them a bit further apart there looks a little bit better bring it back to the center but it's not looking too bad so drop a bit more two squares apart one so they're both there let's put the circles in still not quite aligned but officially that's not looking too bad oh that's looking better if i move that's about there i think that's going to be about the best we do so there's a little bit of blue fringing that's not too bad i don't see anymore but we'll try anyway just see what happens so i think that's looking all right so just to summarize then two levers horizontal and then have that pointing out this way so that your you know your adc is set up and then while looking at the screen in the color mode you then adjust the levers until the red and the blue circles give you a white circle they overlap and there's no color fringing visible it's been such a frustrating morning i've been out for about an hour now and it's only just started i set up under a beautifully clear sky the milky way was visible all the stars were visible and i got everything set up got everything lined up and this cloud came in the thin layer of cloud and it's only just started to clear now 45 minutes later so i'm just kept just doing my captures we've got everything set up we've focused got the adc we've located jupiter but to capital the scene's not the best either so this visibility is jumping around so we'll see what we can do anyway the sky's just starting to turn blue now so even though seeing's not the best we've had that cloud the transparencies the transparency is still not the best the very fact that i'm sitting out here it's a beautiful blue dawn morning and i'm observing and i'm observing features on jupiter you know in my garden it doesn't half give you a thrill so i've captured my captures i've captured my video files i'm getting pretty sleepy now been out for a couple of hours so i think i'll do a few more and then i'm gonna put everything away tear the telescope down and then go and get some get some sleep so i was thinking of packing up but the seeing has suddenly gone remarkably good so i'm actually going to push on through see if i can just capture that last few more i always do this i'm always thinking oh just a few more just a few more and then you suddenly realize you've been up for an extra hour or something so while the seeing's good i'll carry on so good morning i'm feeling a little bit more human now i've had a few hours sleep and a quick shower so let's get on with our processing the first thing to do is open auto stack it now auto stacker is the software that's going to look at each video file look at each frame in each video file and sort through from the sharpest to the noisiest so if we open up our video files now you can either batch process them all together and it loads them in all together or you can just use the best one now just for saving on time i know that this one 211 the ones stamped to 11 and if you remember we've saved it in the windjupost format and used universal time so that's 2021 july 15th at 0 to 11 and 4 10 of a minute it's in my white light format and with the jupiter suffix so i know this is my sharpest one i've left it as a planet here in the english type there's a stabilization if you were shooting a surface of the moon or the sun whether the image fills the entire field of view there's no black edge there's no limb of the planet then you would switch over to surface i or i tend to just leave the dynamic background if there's a bit of haze going or a bit of something like that so leave that ticked and i leave the noise robustness at four you push this up to maybe five six seven if you've got a grainy image if there's a bit of mist or haze and you've had to push that gain up so you've got a bit more noise but four is the normal range and we can always check that afterwards it's then a case of pitting plus aps in the grid and i leave it at 104 pixels that gives me 61 alignment points if you have really small alignment points if you get out of 50 the poor computer is doing three you know was that nearly 300 squares it's got to break up look at the sharpest each one then combine them back together and you can sometimes get this sort of mosaic it looks like you know the sharp edges where the pictures haven't quite combined back together so i find 104 for this setup but it's absolutely fine and the other thing i do is rather than just leave them in this this sort of rectangular grid if you click on multiscale and close to the edge you get all different kinds of squares so big squares small squares little ones all different all mixed together and that really gives a much smoother picture when when autostack combines them all together so it's breaking all of these squares down into the into the picture looking for the sharpest and then combining these all back together to give one sharp image i then leave my number of frames to stack now you need to use percentages or number of frames to stack i tend to be just lazy and do 500 1000 2000 and i do this before i go to bed so i'll load up all my video files i'll do 500 1000 2000 as a planet normal noise robustness so normal range 104 pixel size close to the edge multi-scale and just go to bed and when i come back you know get up have many hours later before work or before the school run they're all there ready for me you can do frame percentage so you know you could do 5 10 20 25 what whatever but i find these works well and i tend to use the 10 the other 1000 or whatever it is uh frame size the 1000 tends to be a good balance between if you have fewer sharp frames you though you get a sharper image it tends to be a bit noisier and 2000 can be a little bit uh what's worse sort of a bit smoother but again that little last little bit of fine detail can't be there and for my setup in our observing conditions here a thousand frames seems to work personally fine but one day we might have a nice a really good seeing when you know you can go a bit higher and get a little less noisy or this thing is really rubbish you've only got a few hundred of really good sharp frames so with the close to the edge and the multi scale we've broken that image of jupiter down into those little squares we then hit stack now this is the point normally when i would go to bed or you can make yourself a cup of tea because it will take a while to crunch through so as you can see auto stack it has finished stacking all those so they've all got queen six it took a while simply because i was using my usb uh was a memory pack rather than running off the hard drive so it does take a lot longer so let's have a look at this then so we can check our quality estimator remember we were talking about the noise robustness earlier there's a slider here so it's now sorted by quality as it just says that one like so that if i press clear look at that so that is the sharpest frame doesn't look very good does it but that's the sharpest frame there and what we're going to do is if we go further and further to the right what we're going to do is get a lower and lower quality and it does look about right actually getting pretty poor down at this end and there's hardly any details so yes if we compare image number frame number 11955 you can barely see the great red spot yet if we come all the way up this end the belts are visible and the great red spots visible so what i'll do now that sort of confirms that the noise robustness is in the right place the other thing i enjoy looking at is the quality graph so what this does it's it's giving you the quality so the jagged gray line is in the frame order so that's the time we recorded them and then the green line is the frame is now in the quality order as they've been stacked so you can see if you imagine that being twelve thousand so that's number twelve thousand frame there that's number one so number one frame is really good so that's the six thousandth frame there but the quality is only about sort of 20 or 30 percent so this is why i like stacking only sort of ten percent or a thousand frames so at least we're getting the high quality frames and we're not getting all this uh mediocrity if you like being stacked on top and reducing the fine details and i'd love to be in the point where if we had really good seeing in efforts on the mountain on top of tenerife again where the graph actually does you know it's a lot of it is up here and then it drops away at the end but with jupiter being so low it's only at 20 25 degrees in the morning sky at the moment we do get quite a large drop with all that poor quality seeing with jupiter just simply being low in the sky so that's all done i'm happy with that so with autostakat having completed its task let's move over to registex just while that's booting up just to reiterate the point made earlier you couldn't take that one sharp frame the very sharpest frame and process it if you look at the frame you can see that it's a very grainy uh poor quality frame you couldn't process that in any way but by stacking you know hundreds if not thousands of those frames all on top of each other it actually brings out all that fine detail so let's open up where's the mouse on there it is select those the ones i was working on earlier let's go to my f drive so i'm going to stack the number 1000 and that's on me there so time at 2 11 in the morning 15th of july 2021 so you can see now the image of jupiter it's lost that sort of fine peppery appearance you know someone sprinkled loads of sound on top of it it's now a much smoother image and that's simply because we've stacked now a thousand frames one on top of each other the signal is obviously built up but the noise is averaged out so we get a much finer image and we can now process now this is the approach i simply use i've got this saved as one of my processes down here and that's jupiter linked wavelet so what i do is just slide that most of the way to the right and i have the noise and the sharpen set 0.8 and 0.3 and that brings out all this fine detail if i just get rgb balance with my infrared cut filter it does give a very greenish tinge to the planet so if i open up the rgb panel the rgb balance i just hit butter balance and it brings it in this much whiter smoother image so let's break that down into stages if i reset the wavelets so we're all back to normal so there's the image we've now got the color balance for more natural color the key thing here is to use the linked wavelets so normally i would slide these back and forth and try and play and see what the best best approach was with the best bit of advice i got from martin luther inspector if you check out his website he said nope just use the link to add linked wavelets don't worry about all that faffing and complicated slide it to the right and then we'll add in some sharpening and i'll just say bring that point three that's made a very blurry image so we need to add in some denoise 0.5 and you can iterate back forth and so oh smooth it all out so we need a bit more because it's still quite noisy still quite loads of stuff let's try that point eight and we're getting some fine detail there and you can play around with the sharpness and the noise as you go and then you can almost adjust just to start adjust to taste so let's try that point five so it's a bit too strong for me now i don't i don't like that looks very over the process the colors are all quite garish let's try somewhere in the middle so point four seems to be working all right and that's with the noise are quite high d noisy so it's almost like an arms race as you sharpen the you also sharpen the not only the fine details but also the noise so therefore you need a bit more denoising and then you add a bit more sharpening you try and balance this out but that doesn't look too bad actually i mean if you compare that to the original image the you know we've got details around the great red spot we've got this leading edge clouds here and i say i really wish we lived you know in a more tropical location where jupiter's high in the sky but remembering jupiter's only 20 25 degrees now for us and yet here we are seeing cloud formations around the great red spot we've got barges in the northern equatorial belt as well so that is my very simple approach to sharpening in registex and what i'll do if i had a whole load of those files all stacked up i would literally make a cup of tea and sharpen each file in turn doing the same approach and hitting that auto balance the other point to mention is when i set up if you remember i set my atmospheric dispersion corrector up so as i got a nice smooth color balance on the limbs i didn't have that red blue prismatic effect if you don't have an adc and haven't got it set you can use the rgb align tool if i get rid of the color balance so here's the rgb alignment tool and it you click the little show area tick and this little green square appears stretch that over a picture of jupiter and hit the estimate and this quenches through it's searching for red and now it's going to search for the blue and you can see i was only after even though jupiter is relatively low i'm only one pixel out between my red and blue position but it actually has given a nicer sort of smoother appearance but it's lost all that i do know sort of high quality view so i tend not to use it when i'm using my atmospheric dispersion corrector otherwise i've got to try and sharpen and bring all those features out as well so that's how i sharpen the images to bring out all that fine detail using reggie stacks so let's quickly run through that again rgb balance auto balance use my linked wavelets so click on the use the wink linked wavelets might slide that up a bit more let's put a bit more sharpening in four five i have to bump my denoising out so let's bump that up to 9.9 so this gear is 0.95 let's bump that down to see how that comes out so that's not looking too bad almost hinting at features in the great red spot but that's where the seeing the atmospheric seeing we have in the sky is the limit so let's save that as an image and what i do is to i want to keep that raw unprocessed image if ever i come back to it later on so i can create a news folder i'm going to call that linked wavelets open that and save that in there let's shrink that down and we're going to open up now i used to have photoshop proper i kind of regretted paying all that money every month to for a subscription i was only using a fraction of the features so i've actually downgraded now and i just use elements which for my imaging planetary image imaging actually meets all my needs we'll close that down so file open we'll go back to the f drive open up the thing 1000 and my linked wavelets are in there and there's the tip file oh yes that was the other thing just make sure you save as a tiff so what i'm going to do now is try and enhance and bring out a little bit more of that fine details so with that layer set up i'm going to go right click duplicate layer i'm going to call that my high pass filter i'm going to set this to overlay filter other high pass and i generally leave it so about four is about right you can go further to the right up to 20 but that just looks awful looking a bit to the left and you don't really get the benefit of it so what's that two pixels there's something coming through there but four i find works but it's about the sweet spot you know sort of ten is it it tends a bit too strong i feel i've just realized i've done that so i'm gonna control z okay filter other high pass filter 4 generally works well enough for my setup so i always use that as a starter for 10. and you can see it's just highlighted those those clown formations have made them a bit stronger it's a bit like an unsharp mask but i find it gives a a more pleasing result so i'm going to okay that but you've got the sort of grainy noisy appearance again so i go filter i'm still on the high pass filter layer blur gaussian blur and again about two two pixels tend to be all right so we're not blurring the raw image we are blurring the high pass filter layer and okay that and if i blink this layer on and off you'll see there it's just bringing out that fine detail on the surface so that's with it off and then with it back on you can see that and you can have a play around with that and that does give quite a measurable increase in image quality but without adding to the noise so this is how i add a high pass filter to increase the contrast of my planetary images so that's the approach that i use and it's amazing how powerful it is if you look at the first frame of the video file it's the very first frame when we press record and then we put it through auto stack it and that's the best frame the sharpest frame and again there's still not much detail visible and then we've stacked the best 1000 together and obviously we introduced that color you can see there again we still haven't got a lot of detail there is a nice smooth image there's still not a lot there and then we put it through the sharpen process and bang all that detail becomes visible you can see see the formations cloud formations around the leading edge of the great red spot and this process doesn't just work on jupiter i've also managed to image the faint subtle outlines of craters on mars and i've also used it to image features of the moon as well such as this picture of mayor orientalis as well so that's the process i use and it works really well and i've managed to make it into an effective process where i'm not spending hours trying to tweak the last little bit of detail out it's robust enough it works i'm not spending hours at the laptop so i hope you find it useful as always if you've enjoyed the video please subscribe and i look forward to bringing you more videos as we explore the night sky you

Channel: Refreshing Views

Views: 8,057

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Id: QesmmxCb_h0

Length: 31min 25sec (1885 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 20 2021